Attila Nagy

It's possible that some of you have never seen a rotary phone in real life. It's likely that many of you have never used a rotary phone: heard the pulse take the place of the tone, mustered your patience as the dial rolls back it its reset, cursed a number with so many zeroes in it because it takes so long to call. And that's a shame, because rotary phones are awesome: physical of a time when the home phone was home decor. Here are some of our faves.

Experimental telephone manufactured by LM Ericsson in the 1920s. Handset is made of hard rubber.

Triple rotary phone at the New York Stock Exchange master control panel, circa 1950.

Drive-in public phone from the 1950s.

A 1950s woman using a telephone headset as she irons.

Photo: Al Barry/Three Lions/Getty Images

Ericofon, aka the cobra phone. Designed in the late 1940s by a design team including Gösta Thames, Ralph Lysell, and Hugo Blomberg. Made by Ericsson Company of Sweden, production began in 1954. It's in MOMA now

Another cool Swedish design: telephone embodied in the form of an aircraft, circa 1960.

This is rocket science: director of NASA Wernher von Braun on the phone, 1961.

Not exactly telephone, but this photo must be here. A system for dialling for a drink: installed in the Flag Inn pub at Bromley Cross in Lancashire, UK. It was devised by thirsty electronics expert Dick Millington. October 1963.

Photo: Keystone/Getty Images

1964: A Japanese telephone operator in Tokyo use the new View Phone, made by Toshiba Shibaura Electric Co.